In one respect, however, Assyria, it is to be feared, had made but little advance beyond the spirit of a comparatively barbarous time.  The “lion” still “tore in pieces for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his holes with prey, and his dens with ravin.”  Advancing civilization, more abundant literature, improved art, had not softened the tempers of the Assyrians, nor rendered them more tender and compassionate in their treatment of captured enemies.  Sennacherib and Esar-haddon show, indeed, in this respect, some superiority to former kings.  They frequently spared their prisoners, even when rebels, and seem seldom to have had recourse to extreme punishments.  But Asshur-bani-pal reverted to the antique system of executions, mutilations, and tortures.  We see on his bas-reliefs the unresisting enemy thrust through with the spear, the tongue torn from the mouth of the captive accused of blasphemy, the rebel king beheaded on the field of battle, and the prisoner brought to execution with the head of a friend or brother hung round his neck.  We see the scourgcrs preceding the king as his regular attendants, with their whips passed through their girdles; we behold the operation of flaying performed either upon living or dead men; we observe those who are about to be executed first struck on the face by the executioner’s fist.  Altogether we seem to have evidence, not of mere severity, which may sometimes be a necessary or even a merciful policy, but of a barbarous cruelty, such as could not fail to harden and brutalize alike those who witnessed and those who inflicted it.  Nineveh, it is plain, still deserved the epithet of “a bloody city,” or “a city of bloods.”  Asshur-bani-pal was harsh, vindictive, unsparing, careless of human suffering—­nay, glorying in his shame, he not merely practised cruelties, but handed the record of them down to posterity by representing them in all their horrors upon his palace walls.

It has been generally supposed that Asshur-bani-pal died about B.C. 648 or 647, in which case he would have continued to the end of his life a prosperous and mighty king.  But recent discoveries render it probable that his reign was extended to a much greater length—­that, in fact, he is to be identified with the Cinneladanus of Ptolemy’s Canon, who held the throne of Babylon from B.C. 647 to 626.  If this be so, we must place in the later years of the reign of Asshur-bani-pal the commencement of Assyria’s decline—­the change whereby she passed from the assailer to the assailed, from the undisputed primacy of Western Asia to a doubtful and precarious position.

This change was owing, in the first instance, to the rise upon her borders of an important military power in the centralized monarchy, established, about B.C. 640, in the neighboring territory of Media.